Integrated circuits have long become a mainstay of many electronic designs. Many items such as processors, memories, custom electronic designs including application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays and sensors use integrated circuit device technology to manufacture these items. Integrated circuit technologies can produce devices en masse, typically on a substrate commonly referred to as a wafer. Individual devices can be separated from the wafer to form dies that include the device. Dies commonly have a square or rectangular shape. This shape is largely an artifact of the sawing technique that is used to separate individual dies from an original substrate.
Often, the initial substrate can be too thick for a particular application. To address substrate thickness, the substrate can be subsequently thinned as one of the final manufacturing steps. Thinned substrates can be very thin, often 200 microns or less. Consequently, the thinned substrate can be more fragile than regular substrate. Furthermore, the square or rectangular shapes of the dies can exacerbate substrate damage, particularly when the substrates are handled after manufacture, but before installation into a device or product. Sharp corners of the die can be prone to damage and can incur fractures to the substrate and can contribute to device failures.
Therefore, what is desired is a way to easily produce thinned integrated circuit substrates without sharp corners to help reduce fractures and damage that can occur on the substrate.